CASE STUDY: Deakin University

Deakin University Improves Desktop User
Experience with Ivanti
About Deakin University
Established in 1974, Deakin University has five campuses—
one in Melbourne, two in Geelong, and one in Warrnambool.
The fifth and fastest-growing campus is in the cloud (online).
Each campus has a distinctive character, rich culture, andstrong presence in its local community.

The Challenge

Challenges§ Deliver a consistent desktop experience across a variety

of student and staff scenarios§ Reduce logon times§ Eliminate reliance on roaming profiles§ Minimize the use of group policiesSolutions

As with many organizations that support large desktop
environments—physical and virtual—profile corruption andexcessive logon times plagued users, especially long-time
Deakin staff.

§ Ivanti Insight§ Ivanti Environment ManagerResults§ Uncovered known and unknown issues affectingperformance§ Reduced logon times by 90 percent§ Eliminated profile corruption issues“We didn’t plan to purchase Insight andEnvironment Manager. But the great resultsfrom the POCs drove us to adjust our budget
to make the funds available. And, after
implementation, we have no regrets. We can’t
wait to see what additional benefits Ivantitechnology can deliver for Deakin.”— David Wyld
Desktop Support Manager,Deakin University

www.ivanti.com

With staff numbering around 4,200, Deakin University
serves a student population of approximately 53,000, which
includes those on and off campus. Staff and students
constantly access the university’s network from labs,
administrative workstations, and off-campus locations.

Jim Zelener, Public Sector Engagement Manager for Ivantipartner Thomas Duryea, noted, “The help desk for Deakin’s
desktop infrastructure support team logged over 600 calls
annually for profile corruption. University staff wereinconvenienced—often repeatedly—by not being able to log
in due to profile corruption. On the IT side, a corrupt profile
typically required an hour to resolve, costing the team 600
man-hours per year.”Zelener continued, “To add insult to injury, fixing a corrupted
profile did not guarantee that the profile would stay fixed.”
User and IT pain was not restricted to corrupt profiles.
Logon times varied from 30 to 40 seconds for users withnew machines to 90 seconds and beyond for older
machines or users with large roaming profiles. In extremecases, a logon might take 10 minutes or more. Many users
in the extreme case category reacted by never logging off,
which meant that necessary restarts to apply patches didn’t
happen, creating security and usability concerns andheartburn for the IT team.

CASE STUDY: Deakin University“We could not deliver a consistent logon experience,”
explains David Wyld, Manager of Desktop Support, Deakin
University. “And we really had no visibility into what washappening as the user logged on to the Deakin platform,
making it incredibly difficult to deliver a consistent logon
experience for all users.”
Wyld also wanted to provide persistent desktop
personalization. “In our student environment, desktop
configurations were lost every time a user logged off,” Wyldsaid. “They had to start from scratch every time.”
Wyld continued, “We realized that allowing students topersonalize their desktop and making that personalization
persistent would be a great differentiator and selling point
for Deakin.”experiencing, which uncovered problems we knew about—and problems we had no idea existed.”
Having the data to guide them, Deakin and the Ivanti team
were able use the granular control provided by Environment
Manager to solve the critical issues affecting user desktops.
“Once we had Ivanti on some test machines, it was easy to
see the difference between before and after Ivanti,”
observes Wyld. “And that was very helpful for getting buy infrom our supervisors.”“We loved Environment Manager’s simplicity and ease ofuse,” added Wyld. “Being able to make changes to things
like group policy triggers with just a few clicks was a great
motivator for us.”

The Results
The Solution: Ivanti Insight and Ivanti
Environment Manager
As Wyld searched for appropriate solutions, Ivanti emergedas Deakin’s most suitable choice. “We needed a technologythat could bridge the gap between our physical environmentand our Citrix VDI deployment,” recalls Wyld. “Then, ofcourse, we wanted to address profile corruption, logon
times, and an over reliance on group policy. Allowing
desktop personalization was our stretch goal.”
Deakin University chose Ivanti Environment Manager todeliver a consistent, fast, logon experience; significantlyreduce profile corruption and reliance on group policy; andultimately enable desktop personalization. Additionally,Deakin chose Ivanti Insight to collect actionable endpoint
data.
Ivanti first ran a proof of concept (POC) implementation ofIvanti Insight at Deakin, establishing a baseline to identify
the processes that were causing problems and neededattention. “We just needed to understand what was goingon,” notes Pande Javanovski, Corporate Account Manager,Ivanti. “We ran the POC for three days and got theinformation we required. At the same time, we wereconfiguring Environment Manager to replace Deakin’s
roaming profiles.”“Ivanti was incredibly valuable just from the standpoint ofvisibility,” Wyld comments. “Often you don’t know you havea problem unless you have a way to measure performance.
With Insight, we had hard data about what people werewww.ivanti.com

Initially, Deakin deployed Environment Manager to 300
machines within its IT division to gather information for alarger rollout. The results were gratifying. Logon times
plummeted and users stopped experiencing profile
corruption. One IT user’s logon time dropped from 15
minutes to 15 seconds, prompting him to send this email toWyld:“Hi David,I am seriously impressed with how Ivanti has changed mybehaviour. I can now shut down in the afternoon, knowing
how long it will be before I can undock and pack up.
Thanks,Jan”

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